Father's Day, First Draft Update
Renaissance Humans, #69
Happy Father’s Day, to all who are a dad to someone.
I am grateful I’m a father. It’s the most important thing I’ll ever do.
This is my favorite post about the influence of a father, from Daniel Schmachtenberger. Here’s an excerpt (Please read the whole thing—he gets into all the little things his father taught/modeled about being an excellent human):
My dad was of an old breed of men that I might have thought only an embellished legend if I hadn’t experienced it firsthand. To get some sense of this…
One time we were working on a semi engine and it was time to put it back in the truck. We were waiting on the tractor to return to the shop so we could lift it in, but we were losing daylight. So he wrapped chains around the engine and lifted it back into the truck by hand. Because it needed done. After we finished the job, he repeated a phrase he said continuously throughout my childhood: “see the job, do the job, stay out of the misery”.
Another time he was standing in a parking lot smoking a cigarette when gunshots were fired in one of the stores. Everyone ducked or ran the other way. My dad ran straight towards the sound of the gunshots. After breaking the door down he found that the man wielding the gun had just shot himself in the head. The woman (his ex wife) he had attacked first was badly bleeding but not dead. My dad bandaged her and held the blood in while the ambulance arrived. She lived. He talked to her during that time about her ex husband finally being out of pain and that she could forgive him. He visited with her afterwards and helped her process the emotions further. When he told me about running towards the gunshots, he assumed the shooter was still alive but said he knew he could keep his body moving through enough bullets to take the shooter out and prevent anyone else from getting hurt. He did this for strangers.
Yet another, a friend called in duress as her son who was a police officer but was also mentally unstable had been aggressive towards her more intensely each night and said he would kill her that night. The police station didn’t believe her and wouldn’t intervene. My dad said we would protect her. He waited in the front yard while I (age 16) waited inside armed. The son pulled up in a police car, got out and charged my dad. They went to the ground, my dad put him in a choke hold, and took his gun and threw it. He held him there for many minutes till other police came. Not because he liked fighting, but because she needed protection and there were no other options.
Once during a business meeting, some of his staff interrupted to say they couldn’t remove the tree limb that was threatening the house without a boom truck. He took his suit jacket off, went outside, threw a rope over the limb, climbed it by hand, pulled the chainsaw up, cut the limb, then went back into his meeting.
Just to add cool factor to the list…we were driving on the highway pulling a trailer…he was driving with his knee while rolling a joint when an axle broke and we lost a wheel. He grabbed the wheel with one hand and navigated the car to the side of the road, put it in park, then kept rolling the joint he had maintained in the other hand, before going to check on the wheel.
From acts of this more physically heroic type, to developing intentional communities, designing maybe the first viable city/state at sea project, accurately predicting when the Berlin wall would come down, advancing educational theory, and so on, my dad did impossible things regularly. At the base of that capacity was a commitment to integrity, deeper than most people know is a possibility.
This was taught explicitly through words, and implicitly through actions.
First Draft Update
I am just past the one month mark in my push to create a finished draft of my next novel by Labor Day. I thought I would share some notes on how it’s going.
Like all art, what I describe below is merely one way among many to reach for creative goals. Your mileage will vary, different strokes for different folks, etc.
I hesitated for a few months before jumping into this draft. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe I was worried I couldn’t pull it off.
So I’m just sending it, figuratively burning the ships behind me. Part my procrastination is I hate writing a first draft. I’d much rather undertake the process of rewriting, sculpting and honing the words. You can’t do that until you have a draft to work with. I like this lady’s take on it:
Some people revise as they go. Dean Koontz famously doesn’t write a new page until every word of the previous pages are as good as he can make them—sometimes he makes dozens of passes over the pages before he proceeds. This means when he gets to the end of the novel, it is basically done.
The danger of this method for a new writer like myself is you can get lost in fine-tuning a niche section of the story. Mired in quicksand. Maybe you finish, maybe you never do.
For now, I am trying the opposite approach.
Get Words. Lots of them.
Claw them from the ether. Revise later.
Systems and Goals, not just Systems
In general, I am a fan of Scott Adams' (He didn’t invent this concept, but popularized it) notion of systems, not goals, which I believe is a good default posture toward the world. As Adams notes, with a goal, 99.9% of the time, you haven’t achieved your goal, while with a system, you meet with success (and the accompanying satisfaction) every day. This is a similar what professional coaches like Bill Walsh (The Score Takes Care of Itself) and Nick Saban (Trust the Process) proclaim as leadership mantras.
Goals
Let’s take goals first. The acronym SMART is often bandied about when we talk goals. While I don’t think it’s some sort of panacea, giving yourself a specific “win” condition is helpful. It provides a focused aim point rather than a vague notion like “write more often” or “work out more.”
Systems
I recently listened to an episode of Thomas Umstattd’s Novel Marketing Podcast, where he interviewed an author named Chris Fox. Fox has a method for turbo-charging your daily wordcount.
The key is: eliminating distractions, time-constrained sprints, and preparation.
Eliminating Distractions: Put your devices on airplane mode, use apps that cut off internet connectivity, and have a tortoise enclosure (John Cleese’s concept of a physical location to undertake creative work). This can be a challenge when you’re a human with a job, familial and friendly obligations. Pick a part of your day where you’re both cognitively fresh and can work uninterrupted. Might be early in the morning or late at night. Per Fox, you are entering a flow state and can really jam.
Time-Constrained Sprints: Set a timer. Do nothing but get words during that window. I did twenty-minute blocks at a time—worked well, but you can even drop down to five or even three minute sprints if you have to find time in the interstices of the day. I am using an excel spreadsheet to document the production of every word. This was helpful when trying to figure out exactly when I had a software issue, which I’ll talk about later.
Preparation: You do need to do some pre-work to make Fox’s method work. Part of “writer’s block” is your mind vapor-locking as to what happens next—too many things to imagine/create at once. If you can plan beforehand, you can frontload many of the key things you need in each scene—Point of view character, conflict, revelations, etc. Some writers don’t work that way—they are discovery writers, or “pantsers”, in the eternal plotter/pantser dichotomy. You can still move fast as a discovery writer, but you’ll probably have more to revise when you get done.
I used the Page One Writer’s Journal to block out scenes, develop plot points, setting details, and well-developed characters (I will do a craft post later on a template I created to help here). It’s a wonderful analog solution to keeping all your key story data in one place.
Incentives
I incentivized my behavior in three ways.
#1: Personal Reward—My laptop is dying. I’ve had it since 2017—the battery won’t hold a charge and the trackpad just died. If I get this draft done, I get a new laptop. While this is nice, I don’t think it’s motivating me.
#2: Public declaration—I told friends, family, and readers I need to write an 80,000 word first draft of a novel by September 2nd. Though I didn’t consciously do it, this goal satisfies the SMART framework. This could potentially backfire on me, if I get too much satisfaction from just talking about writing, rather than actually writing. I don’t think this is likely, though, because of #3.
#3: Personal Penalty—Author and entrepreneur Tim Ferris talks about the concepts of “fear-setting” in this TED talk and accountability in his book 4-Hour Chef. Fear-setting asks you to introspect about both your goals and the things that keep you up at night. Through a step by step process, you can better understand the risks of something occurring, as well the the costs of not working on something you want. Accountability is a penalty for not completing your goal. For this project, I decided if I fail to achieve my goal, I must give $1000.00 to an organization I don’t want to get another red cent of my money.
Results (So Far)
As of yesterday (34 days of sustained novel writing), I have written 40,015 words—Halfway to my goal. This is just under 1200 words a day—which is not a lot by Fox’s standard of 5,000 words in a day, but is a big improvement over my past performance.
Of note, I did have a scare where the writing software I used (Atticus) literally ate two scenes, totaling over three thousand words. I shifted into Scrivener, and will finish the draft in that. This episode was a bit embarrassing, on multiple levels.
For one, I assumed since Atticus was a cloud system, I didn’t need to back up my work myself. This is a rookie mistake of rookie mistakes, literally a day one/week one, JV mistake. Normally I am an obsessive backer-upper of my writing, both on external drives and cloud-based locations.
But another part is my reaction to losing these words. I was upset. I could not find a shred of Stoic indifference, equanimity or poise. There are plenty of stories of writers losing their work and creating something even better the second time around, and ultimately that is the posture I should have adopted. It’s always a little embarrassing when you realize your self-image doesn’t match up to reality.
Atticus customer service recovered the words from their server a week later, but it was enough to scare me away from their software until they work some of the bugs out. Eating two scenes was only part of the issues I had with Atticus—it was buggy and laggy at other times.
Fox’s writing method relies on inducing flow in the writer, which by definition will be something we lose ourselves in. We can apply this to other domains besides writing. It could be something like running, playing an instrument, or learning a language—A simple, actionable template to help get you where you want to go. Skill acquisition, artistic creation—it’s a process. It takes time and effort, but it’s rewarding to both grow and create something new.
The best advice I've ever heard for writing fiction is: "Good writing should surprise the author."
That gave me the freedom to write my first book.
This is awesome. Thanks for sharing bud.
Excited for you.